+Sandy Greene: Engaging Mind and Heart for Deep and Lasting Faith

+Sandy Greene with fellow AMiA bishops +Philip Jones and +Robert Cook

“I think God is trying to make us into the kind of people who start by praying for others who need to know more of him, who witness by word and deed to those people, and who in the end are willing to come alongside and walk with them,” says +Sandy Greene, one of the first bishops in the Anglican Mission in America. This vision was present at the founding of the AMiA, and it’s just as relevant today as the mission seeks to help people “become closer to the Lord and to have a deeper, lasting faith.”

God has long been forming this faith in +Sandy. During his studies at General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, he recalls, “There were mentors who brought depth into my understanding of what ministry was, and that involved a real immersion in Holy Scripture … of taking that a step further and making it much more personal.” He was also influenced early on by the charismatic movement.

+Sandy had been serving as senior pastor of Christ Episcopal Church in Denver, Colorado for about a decade when, in the mid- to late-1990s, he became part of a group interested in reform within the Episcopal church. “We developed this notion of one river with three streams, or three streams coming together to form a single river of Orthodox Christianity,” he recalls. “And those streams would be faithfulness to the Bible, an honoring of godly tradition, both in terms of worship form and particularly the importance of Holy Communion as the central part of worship. But it also had to do with theology the teaching of the Church Fathers, the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds as the foundation of faith. … And the third stream would be an honoring of the work of the Holy Spirit … that we are open to the work of the Spirit, particularly in healing and particularly in the creation of community in such a diverse world in which we live.”

Rooted in this commitment to Scripture, Sacrament and Spirit, this group explored options for moving forward. “What we realized is that we wanted to stay Anglican. And so, to stay Anglican meant we had to connect. If we weren’t connected with the Episcopal church, we had to be connected with some part of the Anglican church.”

Members of the group had connections with Anglican clergy and lay leaders in East Africa and Southeast Asia, including Rwandan archbishop Emmanuel Kolini and Southeast Asian archbishop Moses Tay, and approached these leaders asking for their support in forming a new mission society in the United States. “After a certain amount of prayer and reflection, both of those archbishops and some of their own bishops within the dioceses said yes,” +Sandy recalls. These archbishops consecrated two bishops in the newly formed Anglican Mission in America: +Chuck Murphy, of Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, and +John Rogers, a clergyman and the dean and president of Trinity School for Ministry in Pennsylvania.

The decision to form a missionary society rather than a denomination reflected the goals of its founders. “They came together and they said, ‘We don’t see ourselves as forming a new denomination, but we see ourselves as a group of missionaries who are coming to start new churches in a very secularized America, wherein even many, many of the traditional churches, the older denominational churches, have themselves become secularized,” +Sandy explains. “We thought it would have been presumptuous to say that we were a denomination.”

He continues, “We were a missionary group out of Africa and Southeast Asia, so it was kind of a reversal of the traditional way of Westerners looking at missions. We saw ourselves as representing the orthodoxy of those two churches and their leaders and trying to reproduce that in an American way, a way that was culturally meaningful to Americans. … We said, ‘What we want to do is follow the Lord’s guidance through the Holy Spirit, through the Scripture, being faithful to the tradition.”

As +Sandy clarifies, this tradition requires having a bishop as bishops are needed to confirm new members and ordain clergy. “We wouldn’t be an Anglican church if we didn’t have bishops. That was the point of view of our founders in Africa and Asia, and we agreed.”

+Sandy at Live the Mission 2024

+Sandy was one of four men who was made a bishop a year later. During his early years in this role, he traveled a lot to visit congregations and those who were considering starting churches within the AMiA, many of whom came from diverse Christian traditions outside of Anglicanism. “Some of the work that I was doing there was helping these guys get comfortable with the traditional forms of worship and the approaches,” he recalls.

The role of a bishop in the AMiA is also one of a shepherd, especially to those who shepherd others. “A bishop, as I have come to see it, is a pastor to the pastors. He is a leader to the leaders,” +Sandy shares. “What I want to do is help clergy and other leaders to trust the Scripture … to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit, particularly when it comes to the formation of the soul.”

This involves helping people integrate the mind and the heart. As +Sandy explains, we tend to separate the two, engaging our minds in things like Bible study and our hearts in activities like worship. But, he says, “What happens in the best situation is where there is a fusion between the head and the heart. We’re faithful to the scripture, and yet we’re open to what we might hope is going to be the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the direction, the wisdom, the knowledge, the discernment, even things like prophecies and even unknown tongues and interpretation—those things that our New Testament talks about as the gifts and ministries of the spirit.”

Though +Sandy is now retired, he continues to come alongside many in the AMiA, helping them develop this deep and integrated faith he describes. He takes joy in opportunities to pray with and for church leaders and others, as well as to recommend resources, “so that you can be a person who has developed your head, who has a heart that’s not only toward God, but wherein you are experiencing God’s presence.”

He sums it up: “The ultimate goal is to form us in a way that we can influence others, so that we can be the ones who bring both the Word of God and the way of God by example to others. And hopefully they’ll come with God’s help.”